many things: making maps to explain poems. finn off to pre-school in goggles oh i mean "spiderman eyes". finn and noam, energetic enthused friends.

i will never explain a poem i will only draw rivers and boats!

the fall garden, will not be planted. the "raised bed" i fashioned will remain half-full of dirt (until next spring!).

poems will never understand themselves. they will become maps.

i will write a book of birth and hide it in the map.

superman dance pose.

milk sea child.

here's a small song:

All

all my circling was for this
all my getting off the boat and getting on again
all my search and text and need
all my quiet and tapptapp searching
on the internet every night
look up not insane not depressed
lookup can you say you are a pacifist

in all honesty all my circling was for this
all my circling and what i want i have

friend paintings made at george's (the bar)/ streamering around at the farmer's market

A Finnegan in Black-eyed Susans

slow slow summertime/ fast fast fast (husking corn then eating it)

no poems today: no notes even really. just journal blather! and i will spare you that. it was a good run, though, with the posting every day a little poem-y bit, and i am just going to keep on keeping on with the poem assignments when i have a chance, and posting them here. but i was hit by a whirlwind family visit this weekend, and there is more visitin' to come (yay!) soon! and then also: the looming monday-i-have-to-teach on the fast fast horizon. good-bye summertime. you were beautiful, and full of barred owls, and full of crazy hot weather, and then weirdly cool weather. and i had a good run of writing in you yes. and i feel like you're gone, totally slipping out of my hands. so i will just have to love autumn instead. . .

time and a summer day (bluegrass at the apple orchard, dragonflies, and moonrise)

today i have assigned myself to look at "old" poems i haven't looked at for awhile, and see how they are doing. which also means looking at notes, and hopefully finding something there too. so, that's what.

and here, first, finnegan playing with soaking beans:




SEED’S EYE

silent as a watermelon. but there's a huge heart beating
Underneath skin beyond fields
Oocytes and zygotes little tails
Hexagrams, ovals—pods too—
There in cockeyed rushes--
The salts and the reeds and the pulsing walls;
quick liquid and exiting—little swimmers--
to an electric thought
I AM THE THING WHICH GETS BORN



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The Hopi view of time seems to me to have a certain kinship with the Chinese idea of “seeds”, which are called “the first signs of time.” “The seeds,” we read in the I Ching, “are the first imperceptible beginnings of movement, the first trace of good fortune (or misfortune) that shows itself. . .” The material world arises according to the Chinese in the following way: First there is a preexistent image (trigram); then a copy of this takes shape in corporeal form. What regulates this process of imitation is called a pattern. . . . The movements of the lines and images, and of the infinitesimal germs of events symbolized by them, are invisible but their results manifest themselves in the visible world as good fortune or misfortune.”” (p. 120 Psyche and Matter Marie von Franz)

now everything is born now everything unfolds and time itself is such a mystery

some birthpoem-notes for lenore's 3rd baby before it is born a la the poem assignment she gave me! (re: comment section in idea! post)


:::::::::::here at the birth-window::::::::::::::::


window to the other world but it is made of our bodies;
you can’t see through it
but you can see it—

jon kabat-zinn says something like, there is no place you can stop the sky and say that, that, that right there—is the sky

there is no place you can stop birth and say that is birth. here comes the head, here are the shoulders, the belly. . .

which of those is birth?

is it after everything is born? is right now birth? what if i feel a contraction two years before i am every pregnant? or what if i dream of my baby's name before i even have my period?

when can we say we are born, when can we say that was birth, when can we say now everything is born?

- - - - - - - - - - -

there are a lot of questions circling around birth and its energies, physically and soulfully. also there are questions about now. because i like it, i am going to type out some large sections from jon kabat-zinn's book "coming to our senses"; these particular passsages are on what he calls the "nowscape":

“Everything that unfolds unfolds now, and so might be said to unfold in the nowscape. We’ve already observed how nature unfolds only and always in the now. The trees are growing now. The birds are flying through the air or sitting in the branches only now. The rivers and the mountains are in the now. The ocean is in the now. The planet itself is turning now. One physicist, writing about Einstien and time, observed that change in something is the way we measure time, and anything that changes in a regular way can therefore be called a clock. In fact, it is more accurate to be saying that change is the way we measure time than to say that time is the way we measure change, since time is in and of itself such a mystery. Everything changes, and so there is time. Everything changes, and so we experience time. Everything changes, and so we can experience change by stepping outside of time for a moment, and becoming intimate with what is, beyond the abstraction that is the mystery of time.” (235)

“There is no time other than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. . . We can spin off into the future, rail about the past, think that things will be OK someday provided this happens and that doesn’t happen, all of which may be true to one degree or another, but it still has you missing your life and, in a sense, all life.” (236)

“For now is already the future and it is already here. Now is the future of the previous moment just past, and the future of all those moments that were before that one. Remember back in your own life for a moment, to when you were a child, or an adolescent, or a young adult, or to any other period already gone. This is that future. The you you were hoping to become, it is you. Right here. Right now. You are it. Don’t like it? Who doesn’t like it? Who is even thinking that? And who wants “you” to be better, to have turned out some other way? Is that you you too? Wake up! This is it. You have already turned out." (240)

We Live in a Mysterious Trace of Dreamtime (2 poems) [aug. 9]

I write about and think about dreamtime a lot. I'm not sure quite yet what exactly it means to me. I am learning about it. Since this concept comes from an Aboriginal tradition, one might find it annoying that I'm into this: seems perhaps gentrification or the thinking equivalent. But I did come by this idea honestly; really, it was one of those things where I came across the word somewhere and liked it so much. Maybe I even made it up. And then it kept coming back to me, through various readings I was doing--I was reading a lot about pyschology then (2 years agoish). One of those coincidences, where you discover something for the first time and then it keeps popping up everywhere you turn. I think it's such an awesome concept and so rich--perhaps like the idea of consciousness outside of time. It's a relief to me, just as hearing Team Dresch and Bikini Kill was relief to me when I was 17. At any rate, here are some cut-n-pastes from a website:
http://www.crystalinks.com/dreamtime.html:

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the land - its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and water holes - and its unseen vibrations echo the events that brought that place into creation. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

The Aborigines called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness of the earth. Only in extraordinary states of consciousness can one be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the Earth.
"Dreaming" is also often used to refer to an individual's or group's set of beliefs or spirituality. For instance, an Indigenous Australian might say that they have Kangaroo Dreaming, or Shark Dreaming, or Honey Ant Dreaming, or any combination of Dreamings pertinent to their "country". However, many Indigenous Australians also refer to the creation time as "The Dreaming". The Dreamtime laid down the patterns of life for the Aboriginal people.













Whales & Guitars


The grass has whales inside it, tiny whales with experiences. the whales swim up and between rungs of the water or space ladders. dimensions perhaps overlap. a small green whale seeps in from one dimension. that one whale is human. oh shush you haven’t found any whales at all! way back in time before written or spoken words it meant something to stand up and sing. if you have a voice, be like a whale, or be like a finger. the really good whale is laughing; the good trees have big gaps between leaves. that’s where the whale laughter floats down.




Roots of What Leaps/ A New Person



Together what I am is love for food and minutes
In blue chair yonder sits one river and one (blue) heron

(just kidding)

They have a companion:

She, what leaps, has just climbed on the boat I can feel her senses. It’s me with senses!
Weird, huh? I can feel her sensory organs.

Pure poop of a sentence, edges and angles.
Like eyes spreading out.

We are in mystery dreamtime trace of what is equal to the air.

My brother is on the boat, and has the face of the blue ocean
And I know I will be grass one day, scattered, various, going up.
This is equal to how my soul is right now, on some level, shattered, but going up.

Pulsating, winking. My soul! My body outside here doesn’t show this. See; look.

The boat itself has the face of a butterfly, pure poop.

But here is where I am shattered through it again!

It appears I am one thing but really I am all of this swimming fantastically around.

The only way is to be grateful for any abundance—
My face which equals my brain and the air, says lie in light and be summer be light.
I will try to be summer be light though my eyes are spreading out and dissolving—

See how the grass turns into loops as it hugs my barefeet? See how I'm crushing small green whales?

On the boat there is grass growing! A field, growing in the wooden boat—
And she, what leaps,
stands up, sings songs, looking ahead,
untroubled and riding

sudden storm & whalelet [aug. 9 in for aug. 8]

yesterday we had a sudden afternoon rainstorm. then at night my computer got frozen! so i could not post. but i did write a little bit about a creature i've named a whalelet. or a whelky. or a seed whale. half-whale half-person. for the Awesome Poem Group that i meet up with lately--the assigment being to write about a fantastic creature in an ordinary setting. i don't think that's what i did, but i did something. notes. everything, everything is notes.












The Whalelet, The Seed Whale, and The Whelky




Weird, the whalelet and the seed whale and the whelky—

The whalelet dined on flowers.

The seed whale ate star matter.

The whelky caught brilliant muddy bubbles while lying on his side—


The whalelet came to openness as a result of his nutrition. As a whale, he sat painlessly under trees. He waited for sudden rainstorms to come along and blow the leaves out of the tree. His favorite feeling was when wet leaves were stuck all over his skin.

The seed whale discovered his talent was connectivity, as in electric star currents and building blocks. He loved watching the snow carry the moon because that is what it did. He was invisible. He’s invisible still. He is not visible.

The whelky, funny, came to emptiness as a result of his eating habits. As such, he sang a little song:

If I let myself, I will be let
Trees are letting us let ourselves
Someone or something created that
I am shards of proudness

I will let you and let you again
The open wideness the wideness opens
I have disappeared into what reappears later, leaping
And I will let you leaping let you leaping let you—letyouletyouletyou, leaping

Sudden mind.
Let go.
Good retreat into ebb & flow!

I have been working on this assignment from McIntyre: Please write a poem about the places you have been but no longer are.

These are some notes, in which I am jamming together sentences, making paragraphs, and thinking about places as emotional places; you will recognize the last paragraph from yesterday's post. Notes! By the way, yay, I've been doing this, keeping it up for a week now, and it's been so good for me, for my writing mind, so thanks for indulging me;;;;and now, Notes!:

Sentences and Paragraphs

It’s a lot different to be in the room with a dead person even if they can’t talk. Even bees breathe. I am looking forward to painting and drawing with Finn this afternoon. This feeling is a place where I have been. Another place is self-awkward and not writing a children’s book. A struggle with never thinking lightbeams only thinking scritch and what else do I know. Center of everywhere, center of friendship, the crickets in high grass, get back to the making that is just for the joy of it, get back to the new kind, after difficult places.

Where have I been that I no longer am? What is a place, now? Place, place, place. Place where I am now: place where I no longer am.

No longer am I in an ocean or a sea. I have been in places like that.

I have also been in a situation in which I feel uncomfortable and compromised when I should simply be so full of love. Nervous breakdowns,low-grade depressions, anxiety and stress, moving once or even twice a year, upheaval, no money, crisis in parenting and being an authority and being kind and firm at the same time. Crisis in loving each other. These are places I have been. I have hung on a linden tree branch in labor, staring at a clinging cicada shell. And I have been to the place in that dream I had with windows.

First the moon came closer through the trees until you could touch it. Then came the bubbles streaming off in symmetrical cityscapes at the top of the grass. Next came a whale upstream—appearing like a grey and blue sun around the bend, and then jumping over a rock, into the field with the compass plants. It could have been where we stood two minutes ago. Therefore be bold and present.

Therefore (aug 6)

River of Whales

First the moon came closer through the trees until you could touch it. Then came the bubbles streaming off in airy rows and cityscapes at the tips of the grass. Next was a whale appearing like a grey and blue sun around the bend, and then settling on its side into the field with the compass plants. It could have been where we stood two minutes ago. Therefore be bold and present.

oort (aug 5)

aware of the oort cloud

airy chambers in each ear, this hairpart fraction of daylight, having given what may occur what may occur. blight of wheat, breath change, monocrop, the birds flying low over the house, each motion, the pig genes in the corn plant, anything like seeds, the smart solid sun, the haiku of a sunflower, boy child, semen, cement, dirt, pumpkin seed, earth, comet, gravel, sulfur, corn, growth, sunflower, weed, cracks, grass, the sun. makes sense in a circle the magic of each hair told what to do by something. brain at the center of breath.

whale is called by a voice/ ashes of the soul is a potato [aug. 4]

Katie’s assignment:
"My poem assignment to you is this: A whale is called by a voice, surely it is her true love or something beyond love. She is called from the ocean to swim up a river and the waters become ever more muddy and shallow and the banks become more narrow and slowly, slowly she carries on, fueled by ardor, by hope."

I love this one and I am going to work with it for awhile. As you know, I love thinking about whales and writing poems from their (emotional and sensory)perspective. Yay! So here are two different poem-things I've been working on, from this prompt (2 formed notes with titles:):::::::::::::::::

0000000


now i will catch and be caught by a whale.



when i was born, let me tell it.

and remember the room, liquid , the people, hands
remember my circle came, settled and was myself. i was 5. had felt bad and went to him
his head thrown back and dead. i was born while it was snowing. and is confusing.

death is not the border of love.



----------------------------------------------------------
River Whale



The flowers are in my mouth and the stems taste like fish faces
A greeny fern gets me
That’s how you are and I am lonely
I sit with my loneliness in my blood
Like a wolf listening to a tree
And it sounds like wood

castles, a cat cake, and dreamtime birthday haikus [aug. 3]

finn's third birthday: he has an ear infection, conjuctivitis, and a chocolate catfaced cake.i, his mother, have stayed up late working on haikus for the poetry group i recently joined which meets tomorrow:::::::::::::::;;

birthday in dreamtime 1

face of an old tree is the rain
separating strands of the moon
into what happens



birthday in dreamtime 2

down from the moon comes a baby ladder
it is the mother of our boat
our boat is all we have and it has a ladder also
dangling from its bottom like a root
(it is seeking as it dangles down, to touch a whale)




birthday/dreamtime 3


I was a calf, a baby whale, and a foal
and you were my mother
searching for me with your face and licking me clean
roots dangling from your tongue and teeth
everywhere the smell of earth everywhere
mushrooms popping up in the corners of your mouth




birthday/dreamtime 4

I am in the boat with my imagination, courage, and breath
you are one person I love and when I make a noise to greet you
it is the deep noise of whales


birthday in dreamtime 5

now there's a ladder, strong and invisible, from the boat to the sycamore
from the sycamore to me
I want to be within this changing meaning changing


birthdaydreamtime 6ish


does a thought itself have thoughts?
frozen pea on the floor,
I should be so full of love.
I should be so full of love
who have been made free by the sun and the moon and the clearness between

house notes-thoughts; still life:--tomatoes, photo in white frame, queen anne's lace/light/ dust, mopped kitchen floor & amazing kitchen witch [aug.2]

codi gave me this starting point for working on a poem: "... how about a poem about those houses and moves. Possibly a physical description of each (maybe just a word), plus a descriptive word or phrase about an overwhelming feeling or experience from each place." and i have been working on that today. i listed the 23 houses by street name in chronological order and gave some descriptions for each. . . which got me thinking on the nature of houses & apartments--people moving out and in, leaving their traces and stories hanging in the air, their sounds melted into the walls:::::::::::::::::i'm excited for this poem assignment, think it brings rich possibilities!:::::::::;;

Shall I write about love in each house, how does love happen in each house? Think about the major things that happen in apartments and houses we rent out: we conceive children there, we fight, we kiss, we play, we make poems and songs, we sweat and breathe, we cry in our beds alone, we sleep, we hold resentments, we make food. I am thinking about what happens in houses.

A house. Dangling for hours like a thread in dreamtime above my head—
And what will I do when I don’t have any money, yellow bee?

What should I do now that Finn calls cicadas morning bugs?
What about our backbone’s elbow,
Our gift of anything,
This boat that is full of us?

What if each house was a boat?

I want to make each house a boat.

Each house is a boat: each house is a boat: each house is a boat (23 times).

But can there be a place where everyone is?

Can anyone tell me where?

Come forth and speak.

"But the space of birth is who I am now.

Birth is my boat now, still, even though three years ago."

I planted him; I pushed him out; a full growing tree; cicada’s eeee-eeee.

Three years ago right now it was storming and Finn was brewing in my body:

Tomorrow, three years ago, I stand, dancing out a full hip-swaying contraction in direct August sun, next to a clump of tall sunflowers.